Gaming isn’t for everyone. It never was
The economic barriers of entry for gaming haven’t changed. It’s just difficult to remember them from within the industry
Earlier today I read an article on Digital Trends talking about how gaming is becoming more expensive, using Switch 2 pricing as an example. That is a fact, but the headline and the framing of the article made it sound as if gaming had previously been more accessible, a premise the article sets up itself and then somewhat clumsily erases. I however, already annoyed, did not finish reading, jumped to a conclusion about the author’s social status and posted it on social media. That was dumb of me. I still think that this argument works especially poorly with Nintendo, a company that discounts its first-party games so rarely that being a fan of Nintendo output on a budget has always been very difficult.
However, I think the discussion around who gets to play is always timely, and it engenders very strong reactions every time it comes up. Life is more expensive now than it has been. North America’s tariffs on imported goods as well as the retaliatory tariffs from other countries are also set to make things more expensive, especially goods relevant to gaming such as console parts, which are simply not being produced in the US. While for many people, in this situation console prices aren’t the first thing to worry about, they are one more symptom of ongoing economic issues affecting the gaming industry and those who interact with it.
But being a member of the working class in games has never been easy. Entering the industry, it was startling to regularly see the stark difference between me and other economic classes. The truth is simple: gaming isn’t for everyone, and despite what several marketing campaigns try to tell you, it also never was. I think this particularly irks people in the industry who would like games to keep pace with books and film. Due to their cultural relevance, no one would like to say that people are being priced out of watching films or reading, even as public libraries are closing. Games simply don’t have the relevance, and that’s partially due to the high financial entry barrier.
I grew up as working class. This is important for me, not only because according to the median income I still am, but also because that early economic barrier affects the way you think, even if you eventually move into a different social sphere. I had my first experience of a gaming console thanks to console rental. Back then, you could go to a video rental store, and the really large ones also rented consoles, so for one birthday I got a weekend-long rental. I was hooked. The rental shop also had copies of the free Nintendo Club magazine, so I spent a lot of time reading about games that would hopefully become available to rent and hopefully not be out by the time my mother would allow me the next rental weekend. Eventually, my cousin had to gift me his Super Nintendo and his old games so my uncle would buy him a PlayStation (and he was not happy about it!!). Two of the SNES games I owned were mine, given to me on two consecutive Christmases.
I did get to own a PlayStation and a PlayStation 2, each time through circumstances where someone outside of my family would see it as an act of charity to bestow me with them, but when it came to the actual games, it was the bargain bin, and then one game for my birthday and one for Christmas. The only exception from that rule was buying Final Fantasy XII from my summer job wages, and it had been absolutely devastating to spend all of my hard-earned money from several jobs on a game I didn’t enjoy.
The PS5 was the first console I bought at release, from my own money, because I needed it for my job, which also made it eligible for a tax write-off. But guess what — to write a business expense off, you still have to spend the money first, which is something like the PC I recently broke just remains out of reach unless I get help. If these weren’t things I needed to do my job, I don’t think I would have bothered at all.
The real problem is the assumption of everyone around you that your experiences match up with theirs. That’s what it means to cross into a different social sphere with different income thresholds. It’s the peer pressure from school recess, come to follow me into my work life. People react with surprise when I tell them that no, I haven’t played the Zelda franchise. That popular game from 2011? Mate, I was at university, not a gaming platform in sight.
It’s odd to have made decisions that were meant to make me earn better and enter a job that is intellectually fulfilling, only to then come up against the things I missed out on in order to get there. In response to the Digital Trends article, someone pointed out that this will also affect the number of game designers who will be able to enter the industry, to which I say honey. Baby. Look at the numbers. Point me to the working class kids who make it all the way into game dev. I know the point is that those small numbers will shrink further, but I just dislike that this is a thought that suddenly comes to people because of an expensive console. There are so many socio-economic factors here, most of them already severely stacked against the working class, that this really isn’t the moment you should have that thought. But it is telling, because often, the topic of class doesn’t even come up in games at all, an allergy more deeply seated than that against gender and race.
People love to bring up the prohibitively high cost of GDC, they love it so much, but that’s also due to the status GDC has in the industry. No one talks more about the cost of GDC than those regularly going to GDC. Currently, Develop, PAX, potentially even Gamescom, which I live close to, are similarly out of reach for me as someone looking for work, and that’s not ‘just’ because of the cost of travel — when you’re at a conference, you eat out, you have drinks during meetings, and no one bothers to find an ‘affordable’ option to accommodate you when you’re joining a group. When you lose your financial means, you’re also immediately cut off from the industry, especially as a freelancer. I’ve had a lot of friends help me out during conferences and I’m grateful, but I also fight against a mental barrier of being working class whenever that happens — if you always have to work for everything, being given something, without the expectation to pay it back, feels very weird. It’s still my goal to somehow pay everyone back who’s ever invited me out to a meal, but the list of people is only growing. Sometimes when someone talks about how there are no proper ways for working class people into games, I think about instances like this, because when I’m having a bad day, I think yes, and that’s no surprise. This isn’t an industry designed for the working class, and maybe it would save me a lot of heartache to not constantly fight against forces trying to keep me away.
The point that being priced out of a hobby you could previously afford is of course valid, I just think using your status as a working-class person to make that point, or to use underrepresented children to make that point, feels a little odd when nothing about games accommodated them before. I say this because especially in a working class context, this stuff still sounds like someone playing the world’s tiniest violin. Yes, you should be able to keep a hobby you love, ideally, but I actually never moved past the most striking lesson of being working class life — here today, gone tomorrow. Being priced out isn’t a new phenomenon for the working class, and it’s not going away, so even though it feels like a first-world problem, I think I’d rather hear that argument of the tightening economic screw from someone who is unfamiliar with it. Bringing this up otherwise sounds like now that you earn your own money, you should be able to control yet another facet of a life that’s already priced you out in many ways, just another thing you can’t do, rather than something that is no longer in your grasp. Like you should’ve moved past the working class somehow — “I was priced out as a child, but how can this happen to me now?” I can see how this is perhaps a similar way of thinking to my own ‘gone tomorrow’ argument — always assuming that you might lose something you now have is also very stressful.
But I think the catalyst for making the argument of being priced out now is more the gaming environment. When people have access and tell you that you should have it, that’s usually when things feel worse. Of course it is much more difficult to find an environment where that’s not the case, what with YouTube and TikTok and social media.
What an article on a website like Digital Trends of course can’t say is that a lot of people, a lot of the time, simply have to choose to not immediately buy something, or ever. That hurts, but it’s actually okay. I hope for every working class kid to have lightning in a bottle situations where they do get to experience games, because I love them, but the argument that the future of gaming and the gaming industry are affected by something like this is just not true.